Connie sighed again, and Nora stole a look at the small pale face under the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie’s good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant—or bizarre—effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy—combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, in her look and manner, were often enough to belie the otherwise delightful impression of first youth, to suggest something older and sharper than her twenty years had any right to be. It meant that she had been brought up in a world of elder people, sharing from her teens in its half amused, half sceptical judgments of men and things. Nothing was to be seen of it in her roused moments of pleasure or enthusiasm; at other times it jarred, as though one caught a glimpse of autumn in the spring. But since she and Nora had last met, something had happened. Some heat of feeling or of sympathy had fused in her the elements of being; so that a more human richness and warmth, a deeper and tenderer charm breathed from her whole aspect. Nora, though so much the younger, had hitherto been the comforter and sustainer of Connie; now for the first time, the tired girl felt an impulse—firmly held back—to throw her arms round Connie’s neck, and tell her own troubles. She did not betray it however. There were so many things she wanted to know. First—how was it that Connie had come back so soon? Nora understood there were invitations—to the Tamworths’ and others. Mr. Sorell had reported that the Langmoors wished to carry their niece with them on a round of country-house visits in the autumn, and that Connie had firmly stuck to it that she was due at Oxford for the beginning of term. ‘Why didn’t you go?’ said Nora, half scoffing—‘with all those frocks wasting in the drawers!’ Connie retorted that as for parties, Oxford had seemed to her in the summer term the most gay and giddy place she had ever been in, and that she had always understood that in the October and Lent terms people dined out every night. ‘But all the same—one can _think_ a little here,’ she said, slowly. ‘You didn’t care a bit about that when you first came!’ cried Nora. ‘You despised us because we weren’t soldiers, or diplomats, or politicians. You thought we were a little priggish provincial world where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we had _only_ books and ideas!’ ‘I wasn’t!’ said Connie, indignantly. ‘Only I didn’t think Oxford was everything—and it isn’t! Nora!’—she looked round the Oxford street with a sudden ardour, her eyes running over the groups of undergraduates hurrying back to hall—‘do you think these English boys could ever—well, _fight_—and _die_—for what you call ideas—for their country—as Otto Radowitz could die for Poland?’